Everyone else is watching and reviewing Matrix Revolutions (ha!), so I may as well weigh in on some decent movies. Odious’ fiancée and I just saw Winged Migration, and it was almost as good as everyone’s been saying. It did, however, show undeniable symptoms of being a French movie. It’s mostly silent, but now and then a very Froggy sounding narrator interjects risibly uninformative and obvious statements along the lines of, “Zese birdz, zey migrrrate ver’ ver’ far, zey come wit’ ze spring” The soundtrack is mostly by a Bulgarian Orchestra and vocalists, and it vacillates between apt and distracting, but is pretty satisfactory overall. The film opens and closes, though, to the sounds of a musician only a pretentious Frenchman could think appropriate in a poetic, contemplative film about birds, viz. Nick Cave, albeit evidently in an uncharacteristicly sappy, dippy mood.

There are also some occasional scenes with social subtexts, which seemed rather out of place in such a lyric film. The credits snootily inform us that the shots of hunting were “filmed in North America, where this takes place every year”. Shut up and go enjoy eating songbirds with the smart Frenchmen, you pompous asses, while I raise a glass to hunting, which despite the tranzis’ and Euro-ninnies’ worst efforts is still not (quite) illegal over there. A scene where some sort of blue macaw cleverly escapes from an Amazonian pet-trafficker’s bamboo cage is too obviously contrived to take seriously. And there was a scene where some depressed looking geese wander around a wretchedly polluted Eastern European industrial hell-hole; I actually found it rather moving, but I could hardly keep myself from shouting at the ostentatiously P.C. Santa Fe audience, and perhaps at the film-makers as well, “This is what Communism does for the environment, you pinko socialist morons!”

But enough negatives; I’m glad I went, and this is a beautiful, spectacular visual poem on both birds and worldwide geomorphology . There’s tons of very good (though hardly unsurpassed) footage here of interesting bird behavior, and tons more of them simply flying, over farmland and city, seashores, seacliffs, sand deserts, the Himalayas, Monument Valley, avalanches and calving glaciers, the arctic and antarctic, and more. The backgrounds are stunning and often look fascinatingly abstract. It’s a meditation on landscapes with birds in the foreground adding personal interest and drama; indeed, its avian performers set it apart as possibly the best cast film in recent memory.